While writing a press release for a client the other day, I got to thinking about what I was doing. Dangerous idea, thinking too much. Because the more I thought, the less reason I could find for a company to issue a traditional “press release.” What with the long decline of the trade press, there is less “press” out there to “release” information to.

Companies have been hiring ex-journalists for years as PR people because they knew how to tell a story and how to work with their fellow ink-stained wretches. For those old enough to remember ink.). Marketing automation vendor Eloqua has gone a step further and hired Jesse Noyes , formerly a business reporter for the Boston Herald , as a “corporate reporter.” How would you respond?

At Schwartz Communications’ breakfast roundtable on content marketing last week, attendees were asked to rank which channels they used to get the news out about their company. Plenty of people use “blogs,” “Twitter,” “Facebook,” or “LinkedIn” but “press release” barely registered. That led one attendee to ask why. They get decent readership, she said, as well as some media mentions.

To succeed, the “social media press release” must focus more on content than Web bling. Catherine Marenghi , senior PR manager at Cognizant Technology Solutions (a client of mine) read my recent post asking if it’s “Time to Kill the Press Release? because it’s too stilted and vendor-focused, and asked what I thought of the Social Media Press Release (SMPR) template. My first thought was that a “Social Media Press Release Template” makes about as much sense as a mahogany console for an iPhone. On second thought, my first thought was right.

I’ve long argued that admitting your product or service isn’t the right hammer for every nail is an effective way to sell. The folks at marketing automation software vendor HubSpot seem to agree, judging from a recent blog post on “Seven Reasons Social Media is Bad for Marketing.”. Which they are. Did HubSpot shoot itself in the foot? The implied solution?

I’ve had a great opportunity recently to learn what B2B customers want in content by – shock of shocks – asking them. The impetus is a competitive analysis I’m helping do for a publisher, which includes asking readers about everything from what they read, how they get it (print or online) to how they use content to do their jobs better. Paper is NOT dead. While most of the readers I surveyed just want the daily email update with links to a Web site, a stubborn significant minority still want that hard copy – particularly for “airplane reading” or for reading longer stories. Social networking?
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Some customers are pushing back on software maintenance agreements, threatening vendors with the loss of their most predictable, profitable continuing revenue stream. Priced at 15% or 18% (or more) of the up-front purchase price of the software, maintenance agreements provide customers with updates and enhancements as well as support. For endors, they generate profit margins as high as 85%. Several consultants who help customers negotiate software contracts told me, as part of a story I reported for InfoWorld , that a growing number of customers are ditching maintenance.
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Ask anyone selling marketing software or services what their “cost per lead” is and you’ll get a different, and self-serving, answer. I’ve seen estimates ranging from single dollars to tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars. The cost is always the highest for whatever mechanism (trade shows, telemarketing, direct mail, marketing automation software) the competing vendor is hoping to trash. Of course, everyone cooks the underlying cost numbers to make their approach look best. Is it the current name and contact info of someone who actually visited your booth or downloaded a white paper?
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Some of the more forward-looking PR firms I work with are looking to supplement traditional PR offerings with demand generation services, using marketing automation software such as Marketo and HubSpot to track prospect’s actions to “nurture” them with additional content towards a sale. I’ve long had a gut feeling that this is a good way to go, and my belief has been confirmed my recent survey results cited by the DemandGen Report. They show that the use of marketing automation software is indeed taking off, but not as quickly as some had hoped. Except I just did.
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Like the unicorn , whose horn was said to cure illnesses and neutralize poison, the C-level executive is a mythical creature, though long hunted by IT sales rep looking for a cure to their late-quarter sales slump. But, as Forrester Research points out in a recent report , “.no such role as a C-level executive exists. " There are chief executive officers, chief financial officers, chief operating officers, chief technology officers, chief security officers, etc., but no generic “C-level executive.”. That’s one reason only 15% of executives find sales calls useful and up to their expectations.
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